Oracle buys Sun. Sun previews MySQL update, makes GlassFish Portfolio, OpenSSO and OpenDS available on EC2. Numerous partner announcements from the MySQL conference. Red Hat maps open source adoption. And more.

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Oracle to acquire Sun
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or like me you decided to take a few inappropriately-timed days off) you probably noticed that Oracle announced an agreement to acquire Sun this week. Jay delivered our assessment on Oracle’s open source credentials, while I followed up with some …

Open source in government. Sourcefire announces relationships with Symantec and Microsoft. EPL supercedes CPL. The cost and potential savings of open source. The origins of open source. IBM and Sun - back on? And more.

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# OStatic: Why Isn’t Open Source Even Considered at the U.S. State Government Level?

# Simon Phipps: Five Ideas To Get FOSS Into Governments.

# Sourcefire’s 3D system to be bundled as part of the Symantec Managed Security Services offering.

# Sourcefire has also announced a strategic relationship with Microsoft.

# The Eclipse Foundation has …

Refining the Beekeeper model. Investment opportunities. Schooner, Gear6 and Virident line up memcached appliances. The launch of the Open Source Channel Alliance. Is source code necessary? And more.

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Of bees and trees
We noted last week that James Dixon, CTO of Pentaho, had updated his Beekeeper model for understanding the commercial-community relationships employed by vendors to engage with open source. Roberto Galoppini quickly followed up with some feedback, as did Tarus …

Microsoft and TomTom settle patent claims. Alfresco makes progress and shifts its strategy. The Open Cloud Manifesto is published. Support for free software. And more.

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Quietening the patent drums
Cnet’s Ina Fried had the scoop on the news that Microsoft and TomTom had reached a settlement in their patent dispute. The news story was quickly followed by Microsoft’s official statement, as well as a note from the Software Freedom Law Center that the situation is not completely dealt with. Jay Lyman delivered the 451 CAOS …

Cloudera debuts Hadoop support with $5m in funding. The financial value of open source. More patent problems for Red Hat. Government open source projects on both sides of the pond. Symbian’s release plan. And more.

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Cloudera makes it official
We previously reported the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects back in October. The company made its official debut in not-so polite open source society with the launch of its distribution for Hadoop and …

loops is a small and lightweight framework for Ruby on Rails and Merb created to support simple background loops in your application which are usually used to do some background data processing on your servers (queue workers, batch tasks processors, etc).

Originally loops plugin was created to make our (Scribd.com) own loops code more organized. We used to have tens of different modules with methods that were called with script/runner and then used with nohup and other not so convenient backgrounding techniques. When you have such a number of loops/workers to run in background it becomes a nightmare to manage them on a regular basis (restarts, code upgrades, status/health checking, etc).

After a short time of writing our loops in more …

The open source vendor definition debate rumbles on. How open source could save the US government $3.7bn. Red Hat plans MASS migration to JBoss. Open source content management invades the US. Exploiting the attribution loophole in the GPLv3. And more.

Definition debate rumbles on
Roberto Galoppini joined the open source vendor definition debate, with a perspective looking at the impact on community engagement, and also caught up with David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, about the company’s strategy, noting that not all open source core vendors are created equal.

Meanwhile Tarus Balog of OpenNMS, who …

Reaction to Marten Mickos’s departure from Sun. On open letter to President Obama. Lots of announcements from Sun, the LIMO Foundation and WS02. Mozilla offers to help EC investigation of Microsoft. Black Duck raises funding and gets a new CEO. The state of Red Hat. And more.

Mickos fallout
Kaj Arno maintained that “MySQL’s culture and business philosophy will live on in Sun.” He added: “In fact, you could say MySQL now becomes mainstream at Sun. Former MySQLers continue in key positions, in some cases with a mandate to generalise and apply MySQL related learnings on other open source products.”

For example, Charles Babcock …

Few days ago we were chatting in our corporate Campfire room and one of the guys asked me what do I think about Rails developers hiring process, what questions I’d ask a candidate, etc… This question started really long and interesting discussion and I’d like to share my thoughts on this question in this post.

So, first of all I would like to explain what kind of interviews I really hate Ever since I was thinking of myself as of a developer (many years ago) and was going to “software developer position” interviews I really hated questions like “What is the name and possible values of the third parameter of the function some_freakin_weird_func() from some_weird.h” or “How to declare a virtual destructor and when it could be useful?”… All my life I had pretty practical thinking and never bothered to learn APIs or some really deep language concepts that are useful in 1% of …

All change at Sun. A new CEO at Zend. Ingres enjoys revenue up 32%. Purple Labs raises funding. Is open source a danger to Microsoft or will Danger bring open source to Microsoft? (Not) open source food. And more.

It’s a good week for business card printers
There was a rush of new appointment and departure announcements this week. As already noted today, Sun has confirmed the departure of Marten Mickos as Sun is combining its Software Infrastructure organization with its Database Group to form a unified open source product group under the leadership of Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL & Software Infrastructure.

Earlier in the week Monty Widenius confirmed that he has left Sun, along …